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After 11 years, there's so much packed into Warframe from developer Digital Extremes that it can be fairly daunting to even know where to begin. The free-to-play multiplayer sci-fi looter-shooter has been the studio's focus for over a decade, and it shows, but there's really nowhere else to begin but the beginning. And after what I've seen of the strange and wild upcoming chapter, Warframe: 1999, I have perhaps finally been convinced to do exactly that.
For what it's worth, the developers are aware of the game's reputation. "It's become its own amusement park for people that like science-fiction games, and we continue to add wings to the park every year," says Rebecca Ford, creative director for Warframe at Digital Extremes. According to her, Warframe is fast-paced and sci-fi and weird and melodramatic and weird and fun – and the best place to start is, well, the beginning.
As for what, exactly, made me personally reconsider my long-standing rule that Warframe seemed cool but impenetrable, the answer is relatively straightforward. All it took was an update that goes back in time 25 years to a fictional retro-futuristic past, boss enemies in the form of an antagonistic '90s boy band – with the appropriate music in addition, an instant messenger-style romance system, and a motorcycle mount that you can use as a bomb. You know, the simple things.
Why 2k?
During a virtual and subsequently in-person preview ahead of TennoCon 2024, the team at Digital Extremes shared a brief glimpse of the upcoming content with roughly 25 minutes of gameplay taken from the earliest quest of Warframe: 1999. The most important thing to know is that no, you can't just immediately jump into Warframe: 1999, but the second-most important thing to know is that there's still plenty of time to get to that point as there are seemingly two updates ahead of its Winter 2024 release with a prologue quest of sorts, The Lotus Eaters, set to release in August.
Because of how little we've actually seen of Warframe: 1999, it's somewhat unclear how it really starts or where it goes, but the demo began with Arthur, a Protoframe voiced by Final Fantasy 16's Ben Starr, leading a group called the Hex against Dr. Albrecht Entrati with the goal of tracking him down ahead of midnight on New Year's Eve. While this is an alternative Earth that isn't directly comparable to our own history, Y2K is apparently still canon – and very much a problem.
All of this in the past directly connects to the present in the form of a strange disturbance in the Origin System that players are tasked with exploring. The "how" and the "why" behind this problem remain a mystery, but the "what" happens to be a wild Infested version of in-fiction '90s boy band On-lyne called Technocyte Coda. (On-lyne's hit single 'PARTY OF YOUR LIFETIME' will be available to stream or download tomorrow.)
"We try and add boss fight content, and we try [to] tailor it to a specific style," says Ford when asked how the whole boy band thing happened. "When we were approaching how we could do something with the Infested that felt '90s, there was this really instant, 'Oh, well, make an Infested boy band,' moment that made sense to us, because we wanted to give players instead of like a one-on-one boss fight, a group fight, and what better than a choreographed boy band group?"
"I think the first virus I ever got on my computer in 1999 was trying to download a boy band song through Napster," adds Ford. "And that always stuck with me. Like, how desperately [wanting] to consume boy band music ruined my family computer."
Somewhere between all of that, you're able to use an extremely dated instant messenger system within Warframe: 1999 to build rapport with the various members of the Hex in order to perhaps score a kiss on New Year's Eve. One assumes it's between some protagonist-controlled character and one of the six named Protoframes, but Digital Extremes isn't giving up all of its secrets quite yet, and dodged the part of my question about whether we can expect more of this sort of thing going forward.
"The romance thing, I've always wanted to put some type of romance system in Warframe, but there was never an appropriate scenario to do it," says Ford. "And 1999, as a content drop, is so architected to support it that it just was a natural fit."
While Warframe: 1999 is absolutely its own thing within the larger game, players can revisit it after completion, according to Digital Extremes. In fact, the Atomicycle mount, weapons like Arthur's AX-52 rifle, and new premium, customizable Gemini Skins with full voice acting – complete with exclusive emotes – for Protoframes and base Warframes will all be usable outside the confines of Warframe: 1999.
For now, however, we all must collectively wait to learn more. As for me, well, I've got a whole lot of Warframe to get through before this coming winter.
Thinking of jumping in? Check out our Warframe review, which found the game to be "disarmingly deep, and best of all, free-to-play"
